Steering committee members

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Emma is responsible for leading the Centre and fostering it's aims together with the co-director and the strategic advisory board. She also leads a group interested in how environmental conditions alter key traits that affect the success of animal populations.  She is particularly interested in the impact of infection and disease in wildlife populations and the potential impact this has in the wider One Health Framework.

Email Emma Cunningham

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Sebastian is responsible for leading the Centre and fostering it's aims together with the director and the strategic advisory board. He leads research into the impacts of climate change to marine ecosystems, with a focus on ecosystems from coastlines to the deep-sea. He is particularly interested in how ecosystems and associated communities can mitigate or adapt to projected impacts of climate change. He explores how past events have impacted upon marine ecosystems and organisms, examines how organisms have adapted to survive in a wide variety of present day systems, and uses aquaria experiments to predict how future projected changes will impact organism fitness.

Email Sebastian Hennige

Lindsay is co-lead for the Centre's Earth Theme. Her research focuses on developing numerical models to understand and quantify hydrological extremes, their future evolution and associated impacts on society and the environment. This research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, exploring systemic risk and interconnected impacts associated with hydro-hazards (floods and droughts) and their impacts within cities. Her work takes both a national and international dimension, and she has been involved in recent projects across Africa, Asia and South America.

Email Lindsay Beevers

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Simon is co-lead for the Centre's Earth Theme. He is also a geomorphologist that uses quantitative methods to understand why the surface of our planet looks the way it does, what that reveals about the movement of sediment, water and nutrients, and how topography can be used to infer climate and tectonics. His work investigates mountains, hillslopes and coastal environments. He combines topographic analysis, numerical modelling, fieldwork, isotopic analysis to quantify dates and rates, and theory.

Email Simon Mudd

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Katerina is co-lead for the Centre's Life Theme. She is an evolutionary ecologist interested in understanding evolutionary processes that lead to biological diversity within and among populations and species. Focusing on nonhuman primates, her group studies population dynamics, speciation, adaptation and character trait evolution by combining genetic and genomic tools with ecological, morphological and climatic data. Many primate taxa are threatened or endangered - their research aims to contribute to their conservation by providing valuable arguments and data for conservation efforts.

Email Katerina Guschanski 

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Alex is co-lead for the Centre's Life Theme. He is an evolutionary biologist interested in speciation and adaptation in flowering plants. I completed my honours degree in molecular plant sciences from the University of Edinburgh in 2008. His  research includes the evolution of postglacial diversity in Euphrasia, the maintenance of chromosomal inversions in Mimulus, and the origins of diversity in tropical Begonia. 

Email Alex Twyford

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Nicholle is co-lead for the Centre's Ecosystems theme. Her research aims to help the global effort to protect the World's largest terrestrial carbon store: peatlands. We use a combination of high-resolution spectroscopic techniques, such as NMR and FT-ICR-MS, and next-generation sequencing to uncover the key roles microbes and molecules play in the carbon cycling processes in peatlands.

Email Nicholle Bell

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Eugenia is co-lead for the Centre's Society theme. Eugenia is a social scientist trained at the Universities of Coimbra (Portugal) and York (UK).  Her research interests are located in the fields of environmental sociology, and science and technology studies with a focus on environmental monitoring, public engagement and the use of ICTs in environmental assessments, and citizen science. She is developing research on new practices and notions of public participation, the digital and citizenship.

Email Eugenia Rodrigues

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Peter is co-lead for the Centre's Society theme. His group is interested in the interactions within national and global food systems and land use, combining social, economic and environmental considerations. The work explores the impacts of the global food system on environmental change, including climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as adaptation of land use to environmental change and food system consequences from land-based climate change mitigation actions

Email Peter Alexander

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Loeske Kruuk  is an evolutionary ecologist with a broad range of interests in how evolution works in natural populations. Her research focuses on the evolutionary ecology and quantitative genetics of wild animal populations. Thet aim to understand how both evolutionary processes and environmental conditions result in change over time.  They work on a range of species, mainly using long-term studies of wild vertebrate populations with individual-level field data. Two key aims are to understand the genetic variance of fitness in wild populations, and the impact of current climate change on wild populations.

Email Loeske Kruuk